Pie

Blondies

Trifle

Ice Cream

Cinnamon rolls

Monkey bread

Ooh, Blondies....

This is a big hit in our family. https://www.nigella.com/recipes/cappuccino-pavlova

Or, considering how much sweet stuff there will be, a fresh fruit salad or fresh pineapple.

Merangues or Pavlova

Trifle (though that contains cake)

Some people make matzah toffee all year round or substitute crackers (I posted directions here: https://www.gardenweb.com/discussions/2914046/suggestions-for-matzos#n=14)

peppermint bark

Spiced nuts

Turtles

Pudding/crunchy baked cups full of pudding or mousse

Gummies

Sugared rose petals

Churros/cream puffs/eclairs (all pâte à choux)

Waffles

You had me at ice cream 😀

But would you be able to keep it cold? And how to serve?

Or maybe ice cream sandwiches with store bought cookies?

The blondies sound like a good fit to me. Easy to make, transport and they disappear fast.👍🏻

Trifle can also be made with savoiardi instead of cake. You can make individual ones in disposable cups :-)

How many servings do you need?

Cranberry pistachio white chocolate bark. Very easy and looks festive.

Just thinking about cranberry curd that’s so yummy. I’ve used it to fill little two-bite size tart shells. I haven’t tried these bars but they sure sound good.

https://www.thekitchn.com/fall-recipe-cranberry-squares-133199

Little fruit brochettes. Mini ice-cream cones. People forget how good simple ice-cream can be.

mxk, let us know what you decide!😃

OK - these have chocolate, but they're supposedly really good - from Trader Joe's...

Coffee Bean Hold the Cone are fantastic. Unfortunately, they're seasonal.

https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/coffee-bean-hold-the-cone-mini-ice-cream-cones-070297

Lots of great ideas here. I'll add one more: cannoli. Not a cookie and unless you dip them in chocolate, you don't have that flavor.

Dates stuffed with walnuts (or almonds) rolled in coconut. I have some of these now, but I bought them that way from Shield's Date Garden. I also have some Bahri dates, which are very sweet and soft just by themselves. These are seasonal, but the season is now.

Trifle is a holiday tradition in our house. This year I plan to make a new recipe, Gingerbread Eggnog trifle. it looks different and I love the combination.

Pie....perhaps mini pies...I make crustless cheesecakes in muffin tins...I butter the tins heavily then p[ut finely ground almonds in them and tip so allt he butter is covered, fill with cheesecake mixture, bake and when cool fill the slight depression with either chocolate or fruit preserves.

Stollen. Aldis has good ones you can buy. A bit of work to make from scratch but I've done it. Somewhere out there, I think from King Arthur Flour, I saw a recipe for a stollen style quick bread. https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2009/12/06/stollen-moments

That reminds me that Trader Joe's has almond kringles rn for the holidays...

Lemon bars. Trader Joes has fabulous frozen ones, but they are so easy to make. Top with a dried or sugared cranberry.

Just buy a cheescake and save yourself some baking.

Since you don't want to bake back to back cakes, how about making two at once? If you make up a big basic Victoria Sponge mix, ie equal weights eggs, sugar, butter and flour, creaming method, you can then turn it into two different cakes and bake them together. e.g. apple, pear, orange, peach, coffee and walnut, lemon drizzle, marble, coconut, pnb, caraway. They can all be made starting with the same basic recipe and technique.

Wow! Floral, I'd heard ”Victoria Sponge” on TV, but never remembered to look it up. I had no idea it was good old pound cake (as we call it)! So now I have looked it up, and read that what distinguishes it as ”Victoria” is the invention/inclusion of baking powder, which our pound cake doesn't traditionally have (egg rising, only), and most of the recipes I saw used self-rising flour (the BP), and some have both self-rising and BP. Did you mean self-rising flour? I also saw that the recipes for Victoria sponge are as muddled as pound cake recipes are, neither adhering to the actual definitions through drift in the names.

BTW, I agree about batching cakes and varying the flavor, but only if you can have two ovens going, or have multilevel convection good enough for cakes, especially if there's baking powder discharging.

Yes, always self raising flour for Victoria Sponge. And also BP if you want to be on the safe side. I don't know any alternative recipes for VS. Afaik it's always the same formula. I don't know how else you'd make it.

You are obviously a much more scientific baker than I am. I often chuck different versions of this cake in the same oven.

Thanks for the clarification on the self-rising flour. We have it here, but I think it's more popular in the South. Most of the bakers I know, IRL, use plain flour and add their own baking powder and salt. Easy to make, either way.

What I meant about the name was that people are calling cakes that are notwhat you would think of as the actual recipe, "Victoria Sponge". They also call any kind of butter cake, "pound cake," when clearly they aren't using equal weights. But then, there are regions where all sodapop is called "Coke" so when you're offered a Coke, it could be a 7Up. I just get confused with all the different names for cakes, which aren't being used according to their definitions, and then someone will throw in French terms that aren't exactly what we make, and I'm lost in the translation. That's why I usually just go to the recipe ingredients to talk about cake (IRL, "show me the recipe!") I can make a good cake with only rough measurements, totally improv. or a good recipe followed to the T, or riff off a partial recipe at will, but it's hard to fathom a cake without knowing what kind of flour and fat are being used. The differences are vast. Cake is much more easygoing than cookies. Still, you have to start with a good understanding of cake.

So, having said that, it's not the different versions of VS or PC in the same oven I was remarking upon, but the number of layers for making two whole different cakes at once. A lot of home ovens here, even with convection, only make good cakes on the middle shelf, and if your batter is waiting for the first shelf of cakes to bake, the baking powder will discharge in the ones waiting--though perhaps the baking powder in your self rising flour is heat activated only? Another place where it's important to know the ingredients.

I have no idea how the chemistry works. But I do know not to leave cake mixture hanging around before baking. The different flavours I mentioned are quickly added to the basic mix and then they all go in the oven together. No mix hanging around. It works in my oven and if I'm using the oven I always try to fill it for economy.

That's a good idea, but my oven is acting wonky and I don't think the door completely seals, I'm afraid to have two racks going at the same time -- I've restricted my oven use to one rack only, placed smack dab in the middle, cooking one thing at a time. (yes, I've got my eyes on a replacement oven but that certainly won't happen before Christmas).

Thanks for all the ideas. I pulled some recipes -- I'll sit down with them tomorrow and decide what to make so I can go shopping before the weekend.

Having looked at recipes for pound cake it seems that, although the ingredients and proportions are the same, the result is not. Victoria Sponge should be light and moist and is baked in two sandwich tins, not a loaf tin. My understanding from reading is that pound cake is denser and heavier. Does that sound right?

Yes, pound cake is more like Madeira cake.

Yes. Good deducing. As my research told me, the Victoria in Victoria Sponge is baking powder, I believe because it was invented during Queen Victoria's reign. Real pound cake is egg rising, but with the quantity of butter and flour, it has a close texture and density. It's almost always baked in a loaf pan, or ring if not, so that it will rise and set correctly, and bake through. That's why I looked it all up at length—my first reation of ”it's pound cake” was missing the self-rising part. But there are people who call cakes with baking powder ”pound cake” because they don't see the BP as a crucial difference. There is no standard terminology for different cake textures here, even though there is among the culinary establishment, and even cookbooks are published with regional colloquialisms, which makes the whole thing very confusing! But if I called the baking-powder-added pound cake ”Victoria Sponge” they'd just stare and think I was trying to be fancy, rather than disambiguating.

I also had to research ”sandwich tins” because I knew I was missing something. Pictures of Victoria Sponge cakes looked like regular ”butter cakes” (butter as opposed to chiffon) with a nice filling. Our ”sandwich” pan is a square rather than slant sided loaf pan for making sandwich bread (a sub-genre is the pullman pan which has a slide on lid to bake square slices with no domed top). The English bakers discussing what ”sandwich tins“ are, including Nigella Lawson, who is followed by a great many, here, assumed one knew what they were to begin with. Then I found a purveyor whose pictures made it clear. They're what we call layer cake pans. I had guessed that from the cake pictures, but had it confirmed. What they were showing as ”cake tins”, higher sided with loose bottoms (though I think the sandwich tins had loose bottoms, too, which layer cake pans generally do not), are more like our cheesecake pans. We have high sided rounds, but they're usually more used commercially, like for tiered or architectural cakes. Wasn't it Winston Churchill who said ours were two nations separated by a common language?

So...Madeira Cake. One source claimed it was pound cake, but all the modern recipes I looked at are not pound cakes. The all have baking powder and lemon and the proportions are not 1:1:1:1. But it does seem to have more flour, and does look sort of like pound cake. They also have lemon in common. You can flavor pound cake, but then you'd have ”lemon pound cake”.

Sandwich tins may or may not have loose bottoms but mostly don't. The name refers to the fact that they make shallow cakes which are then sandwiched together with something gooey. For a classic VS that would be cream and strawberry or raspberry jam.

I have no clue when I start seeing references to various US cakes. You seem to have infinitely more types than we do and the same goes for cookies. In fact cookie making in general (or biscuits here) is hardly a thing at all. Very few people make them and dishing them out to friends and neighbours isn't at all common. I was surprised at the huge quantities some people bake as mentioned on the favourite cookie thread.

I think the quote is actually George Bernard Shaw.

Ah! Shaw. You're right. Thanks for the correction! (Truly!)

Funny about cakes. I always think of France as having all the different cakes. But if there's any cake that gains popularity, you'll see it in our bakeries. Like Tres Leches used to just be in the Mexican bakeries, but it's mainstream now. Most of our cakes are butter cake variations, with a few chiffons thrown in, whereas French cakes have all kinds of different batters/doughs and creams. But maybe that's just me being unaware of the cakes, or lack thereof, in the UK. For us, unless we're being divergent, celebrations have cakes: Birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, baptisms, graduations, etc. And less so now, but in the past, most people served dessert at a regular home meal (back when people were thinner!). Often that meant homebaked cake. Which is where the rise of the cake mix came from. And then the rise of cakes made by doctoring cake mixes.

Interesting about the cookies. We have infinite kinds of cookies, and as you might have seen in the other thread, traditions of baking many kinds and making gift baskets for friends and neighbors. As we've grown more health conscious that has become less of a thing, but it's still very much done. On American TV you'll see challenge shows for decorating and constructing with cookies, and they do take flavor and texture into account, but the real cookies that most people bake (or buy) and eat are mostly about the eating.

Growing up for me, dessert was fruit, but there were always cookies and ice cream available. My father liked both. We rarely had cake that wasn't leftover from a celebration, but there were lots of celebrations. What we really looked forward to, every year, however, which my mother would get for the big Hanukkah party (where there were tons of homemade and individually wrapped cookies hanging on forms as decorations to eat, along with net bags of chocolate coins), was the Swiss bakery fruit torte, which other bakeries have started selling in recent years, but not as good. It was a huge sheet pan sized of puff filled with pastry cream and the ripest and best and most delicious of berries and tropical fruits, with a light tart glaze.